THE DENOMINATIONAL COLLEGE 361 



founded in the past to accomplish the twofold task of educating 

 ministers for the ministry and citizens for citizenship, still exist for the 

 sake of helping out with the educational work of the country, the 

 great task of the state colleges and universities. But the state will not 

 do its whole duty until the entire responsibility devolves upon the state 

 alone. If the state does not provide enough colleges (using this general 

 term now for both college and university), it is the state and no 

 one else who should set about the task of providing additional ones. 

 The state is no pauper on the hands of its citizens when it comes to a 

 question of providing and maintaining a sufficient number of reform 

 schools or of penitentiaries. No more should it be so in the far more 

 vital matter of the education of its normal and desirable citizens. 



Briefly, the national, state and municipal governments are not doing 

 their duty until their citizens are offered such adequate opportunity for 

 intellectual and technical training as to render unnecessary all such 

 offering of opportunity by institutions founded upon a private or re- 

 ligious basis. This position places no difficulty in the way of private 

 citizens or organizations who wish to give direct financial aid to institu- 

 tions of learning. Their gifts would instead reflect higher honor upon 

 them, inasmuch as they would be a manifestation of unadulterated 

 patriotism. Those who wish to give to the cause of religious instruction 

 would find the field as large and attractive, and untrammeled by other 

 real or apparent motives, in the various institutions or organizations to 

 which their donations would be made. 



Moreover, the impetus in this matter must come from the state 

 itself. The remedy will not be begun by the denominational college, 

 for, unless something is done from without, it will continue to exist 

 from mere inertia. The remedy will not be begun by the students, 

 for they will in general follow the line of least resistance, and attend 

 the institution which other members of their families and their friends 

 have attended. They will attend the college which their parents aid 

 materially with financial support. They feel a moral obligation to 

 help swell its roll of attendance, and they have been taught, as were 

 their parents before them, that the college supported by their church 

 deserves somehow a more direct and solicitous care and interest and aid 

 than does the college supported by their state. Yet it is the students 

 of the denominational college who receive from it the most direct harm, 

 along with the educational advantages of which they avail themselves. 

 They are subjected daily to the influence of some particular denomina- 

 tion, in either a direct or indirect method. The denomination may be 

 the one to which their parents belong, and to which they would also 

 ally themselves, or have already allied themselves ; but the harm consists 

 in that they are led blindly along, instead of being left to make the 

 choice of their own free wills, as our country in the beginning proposed 



VOL. LXXVI. — 25. 



